Study for Obedience: A novel

This allegorical novel follows a young woman who moves to her ancestral region and, after taking a job in her brother's house, finds herself surrounded by distrust and unexplained disturbances. With restrained prose and an atmosphere of unease, it explores obedience, exclusion, and imbalances of power in a highly experimental mode.

obedienceoutsiderhoodpowerisolationunease

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Work Information

In a daily life that slowly unravels, the burden of being an outsider presses in from every side.

A young woman takes on domestic work for her brother in the land of their ancestors, only to find herself cornered by the gaze of the community and a series of inexplicable events. Family obligation, the feeling of exclusion, and warped power relations converge into an unsettling fable through Bernstein's concise and exacting prose.

Review Summaries

Some readers are drawn to the controlled narration and uncanny premise, while others are unsettled by the density of the prose and the book's opacity. The aftereffect is sharp, but responses suggest that interpretive difficulty outweighs easy accessibility.

Book Information

Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2024-08-27
Pages: 208 pages
Language: 英語
Size: 13.21 x 1.35 x 20.29 cm
ISBN-13: 9781039009080
ISBN-10: 1039009085
Price: 2731 JPY
Category: 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense

WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize Included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2023 Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction. A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing. With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

SARAH BERNSTEIN is from Montreal, Canada, and lives in Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Granta among other publications. Her first novel, The Coming Bad Days , was published in 2021. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Reviews

A me non di madre lingua inglese non piace il suo stile di scrittura. Ma forse il mio giudizio non vale. È una storia angosciosa, tristissima. La protagonista, inafferrabile e incoerente nella descrizione, è irritante, insopportabile. Fa stare male anche fisicamente!
There is no doubt that the book is well written but you can never really identify and know the character in the story. Throughout the whole story you do not know where the story is in the world, or where she came from other than she is a foreigner somewhere and is have a hard time trying to integrate and her brother is ill but that is all. There is a distinctive lack of emotion in her thoughts as though she is an observer rather than being personally involved and nothing has much context. I personally found it a bit of unsatifying read and had no insight into the story reflecting on it afterwards.
Enjoyed book
So, what was this about? Oh!! I am supposed to tell you that after reading the book. But quite frankly I don't have a clue...it can mean so many things. There is reference to Jewishness & possible undertones of pre-ordained persecution..what else?
Out of 35 members only two of us finished it. Only time this has happened in 10 years. It just drones on and on.